http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=2e89df22-23d2-4cd9-b737-f975e46da04b
Last month, I wrote a column about the state of Quebec, in which I urged nationalists to stop griping about the past and learn to appreciate their province's earned status in one of the most successful countries in the world. A few weeks later, there appeared in these pages a rebuttal from Quebec historian Eric Bedard, who scolded me for arguing that (in his words) "Quebec nationalists are spoiled children and crybabies who are never satisfied with the generosity shown to them by their older English Canadian brothers."
In fact, I argued no such thing. As I've written elsewhere, I believe that English Canada, in Quebec and out, conceded as little as it could to the French-Canadians, and for an inexcusably long time thought them fit for little more than rolling their tennis courts at such Anglo enclaves as Knowlton and Murray Bay.
Rather, I emphasized that acute strains appeared when the French-Canadian leadership, having assured Anglo Canada that a bona fide attempt to accommodate the French would be successful, instead greeted gestures of rapprochement with accusations of attempted assimilation into English Canada.
In the 1970s, while millions of English Canadian school students, in communities where there were few French speakers, were studying French, Robert Bourassa's Liberals revoked the right of Quebec parents to choose the language of instruction of their children, as between French and English. He also set up the infamous language police, who became one of Quebec's greatest tourist attractions. Rene Levesque's separatists took this farther with Bill 101 in 1977, and the Quebec government invoked the Notwithstanding Clause to protect it. (The Trudeau government, meanwhile, did not lift a finger to assist or encourage the non-French in Quebec.)
Nor did I claim, as Mr. Bedard suggests, that the "myth of the Great Darkness" (regarding the pre-Quiet Revolution era, presided over by Maurice Duplessis and previous regimes) was fabricated exclusively by Quebec nationalists. Most of the nationalists of the time were in fact supporters of Duplessis and his pre-revolutionary policies. (There were virtually no separatists while Duplessis lived, because he co-opted the nationalists into a more sensible pursuit of the province's interests.) The Quebec Liberals under Jean Lesage, the ones who proclaimed and enacted the Quiet Revolution, were an uneasy alliance of modernizers, federalist, nationalist and separatist.
I agree with Mr. Bedard that the federal Liberals were part of the problem during all of these events. Theirs was the party that would make Confederation work for Quebec -- but elsewhere in Canada, they would keep Quebec in its place. To the bonne ententistes, this meant the conciliation of Quebec; and to the rednecks, it meant the imposition of whatever was necessary to suppress separatist impudences. When Duplessis forced the St. Laurent government to recognize the concurrent provincial jurisdiction in direct taxation in 1955, by threatening to hold an election on the issue of double taxation, it was represented by federal Liberals as a menace to Canada. When Lester Pearson made even greater concessions to Lesage, the Liberals touted both as saviours of Confederation.
As Mr. Bedard notes, Pierre Trudeau and the other leading members of Quebec's Cite Libre federalists not only confected the myth of Duplessis' "Great Darkness" -- which was, in fact, the era of the greatest economic and social progress in the history, prior or subsequent, of French Canada. They, along with Lesage's Quebec Liberals, sold the theory that education and medical care could be de-clericalized and the public service unionized, without reducing its quality or scaling back the resources available for infrastructure improvements by the Quebec government, and without increasing debt or taxes, nor seriously undermining the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec, to which Trudeau, Lesage and Levesque all professed to be strenuous adherents. This was the beginning of the political sale of colossal Quebec fairy tales, which reached its climax with the confidence trick of "sovereignty association," Levesque's constitutional fantasy of how to suck and blow at the same time.
Eventually, the political uncertainty and steady redefinition of English-language rights into revocable privileges drove a million people out of Quebec, but opened up finer homes, offices and titles for the nationalist Quebec elite to occupy after frightening off their former occupants. The federal Liberal reply was to pour money from Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia into Quebec -- a wealth transfer that was justified as part of Ottawa's larger campaign to demonstrate we are more "caring and sharing" than the United States (while refusing to disclose the real cost of these transfers of money to Quebec).
The main point where Mr. Bedard and I still part company is over the benignity of the Quiet Revolution.
Of course, the authoritarian, priest-ridden and often cynical regime of Duplessis, hugely successful though it was, had to change, and Duplessis' two chosen successors, Paul Sauve and Daniel Johnson, started to do that. The Quiet Revolution occurred, and was resumed in 1970, because of the untimely death in office of all three of these talented premiers. It started off earnestly and progressively, but chased out 15% of the population, shrank the economy, indebted and overtaxed the province, and put all Canada under a cloud for decades. This need not have happened. But once the conservative-nationalist alliance of the Union Nationale fragmented, the nationalists were running free and bound to win an election, and test Confederation eventually. The benefits of the Quiet Revolution were going to happen anyway, but not the terrible strains and dislocations.
As for Mr. Bedard's theory that Levesque showed his respect for Duplessis by unveiling his statue in 1977 (which had been in mothballs for 16 years), Levesque was still fishing for nationalist votes but told me himself that he took that decision when future premier Bernard Landry read to their first cabinet meeting from my book about Duplessis, that "Successive premiers made themselves seem ridiculous by appearing to be afraid of Duplessis' statue."
They did, and they were.
